Controversy is already brewing in the Defensive Player of the Year race. T.J. Watt leads the pack in DPOY odds by a large margin despite being on pace for just the sixth most productive season of his NFL career. This comes one year after the Steelers star led the NFL with 19.0 sacks and finished second in DPOY voting.

But when a legendary player isn’t producing at the rate he once did, you have to ask yourself why.

There’s an argument that Watt, now 30 years old, is showing signs of aging. Football has taken a toll on the All-Pro edge rusher’s body over the years. Watt started just one season in college for the Wisconsin Badgers back in 2016 because of injuries. In recent years, Watt landed on IR with a torn pectoral muscle in 2022, which caused him to miss seven games.

While Watt may be exiting his prime and beginning to slow down, there’s another factor at play. The future Hall of Famer is being chipped at an unprecedented rate.

This year, Pro Football Focus has been tracking chip percentages for edge rushers — the number and percentage of snaps a player is ‘chipped’ by an offensive player at the beginning of a pass-rush snap. Watt is the runaway leader in this department.

According to PFF, Watt has been chipped 32.74 percent of the time when rushing the quarterback following Week 14.

Following in a distant second place is reigning DPOY, Myles Garrett, who is being chipped at a rate of 26.16 percent. In total Watt has been chipped on 146 snaps this season — blowing every other player out of the water. Garrett’s 90 total chips are good for second place in the NFL entering Week 15.

It’s worth noting that ‘chips’ are not double-teams. Other advanced metrics show that players like Garrett and Micah Parsons are doubled at a higher rate. However, much of this has to do with their alignment on the defense and varied assignments that have these players moving around the formation.

T.J. Watt has an excuse for underwhelming sack and pressure totals

As a pure pass rusher, it’s hard to argue that Watt is the best in the league right now in a tier of his own. Though he’s unquestionably the most lethal at creating splash plays when he gets to the quarterback, Watt doesn’t win at as high of a rate or cause as much pressure as many of the top players in the league this year.

Regardless, teams are accounting for one of the league’s best defensive players to ensure that Watt doesn’t come up with the game-altering play we’ve been accustomed to seeing so often from him.

Because he has been chipped so frequently, Watt ranks just 28th in the NFL in pressures (39) despite earning the second-most pass-rush snaps in the league this year (448) behind only Maxx Crosby. But the context matters here.

With Watt forced to play so many snaps, the 30-year-old edge rusher isn’t going to be as fresh on a play-by-play basis as other players at his position. This fatigue will no doubt impact his effectiveness and consistency in getting after the quarterback. Even other variables like the QB getting rid of the ball rapidly to avoid Watt have resulted in the All-Pro missing out on nearly double the number of pressures this season.

I’d also argue that chips are more disruptive to a player’s pass rush than a double team, as chips eliminate an edge rusher’s explosive get-off and essentially take away the ability to convert speed to power during the rush.

When you evaluate how offenses have accounted for T.J. Watt this year, it’s not hard to see why the Steelers star has posted underwhelming sack and pressure numbers compared to what we are used to seeing from him.